Manager Memo podcast · Len Samborowski, MBA Associate Professor, Nichols College

Become Comfortable with the Uncomfortable: Increasing Sales

·38 min·2 clips

Jim says the average financial advisor struggles while the top one-hundredth of 1% can make $20 million to $25 million a year.

A HomeServe ad opens the episode. Then the host brings in Jim Effner, an author, keynote speaker, and P2P Group president and CEO who trains financial professionals on mindset, belief, and language. The conversation stays plainspoken. Jim calls from Las Vegas, where mild winter weather gives them an easy way into the business talk. His story starts with motivation. Earlier in his career, money, achievement, recognition, ego, and plaques mattered to him. P2P came from a different place. He could retire by other people's definition, though not necessarily stop earning forever, and he wanted the work to have purpose. That purpose was giving back. The industry had meant a lot to him and his family, and he thought it was missing real professional sales training. That belief ran into resistance quickly. Even with his status and experience, firm owners often heard him as another vendor trying to get on the calendar. That bothered him. He felt he was bringing help from a rare perspective, while prospects put him in the same stack as every other outside pitch. The lesson is awkward, but useful. In sales, the buyer does not automatically feel your intent, your history, or your sincerity just because those things are real to you. Jim's answer is mindset work. Advisors need to look at what they believe about selling, then learn language that makes conversations clearer, calmer, and more useful. The host closes by noting that marketing, TVs, and movies push people toward consumption. In that environment, Jim is talking about selling with enough confidence and clarity that help does not sound like more noise.

As heard by us

A grounded sales conversation about reputation, rejection, and sounding useful.

Manager Memo is at its best when it stays close to the awkwardness of selling into financial services, where the room already assumes the pitch is coming.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

When you want a plainspoken reset on selling without sounding salesy.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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